COVID-19 Systems Biology, Multi-Omics Integration, and Digital Technologies in Ecology, Health, and Society
More than two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, the global struggle with SARS-CoV-2 continues. Moreover, we are moving into unchartered territory with planetary biodiversity loss and climate emergency. Going forward, we need to expand from reactive crisis management to a long-term and equitable systems vision for how best to govern COVID-19 and other ecological crises in the 21st century. Expanding our planetary health intervention toolbox by systems science and integrative biology scholarship has never been this timely and significant.
OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology is rising up to these challenges and raising the bar on systems biology so as to boost the discovery and development of new diagnostics and interventions against COVID-19. We need a battery of vaccines, small molecule oral antiviral drugs, and biomarkers/theranostics to forecast individual and population variability in COVID-19 susceptibility, prognosis, and resistance.
Human health and nonhuman animal health are closely intertwined,, and depend on each other and biodiversity. Notwithstanding the continuing risks for other zoonotic outbreaks in the 21st century, digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) offer prospects and challenges in numerous contexts, for example, in omics data collection, phenotyping, strengthening data analysis and contextualization.
We invite new manuscripts for peer-review on topics that include, but are not limited to the following:
- COVID-19 systems biology: high-quality, original research papers and expert reviews dealing with all aspects of SARS-CoV-2 integrative biology, diverse “OMICS-es,” genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, metabolomics, phenomics, and multi-omics data analysis, integration and modeling
- Mechanisms of individual and population variability in COVID-19 susceptibility, prognosis, and resistance, as seen through a lens of systems medicine
- Emerging biomarkers for COVID-19 that support decision-making in the clinic
- Antiviral drugs for COVID-19: mechanisms of action, efficacy, and safety, informed by multi-omics research, analysis, and integration
- Innovative applications of digital technologies that help decipher the systems biology of SARS-CoV-2, for example, the IoMT and machine learning to strengthen phenomics, discovery science, and translational medicine
- Manuscripts dealing with societal dimensions and critical studies of COVID-19, examining impacts at the level of health systems and communities around the world, and with social justice and equity in planetary health in mind
- COVID-19 digital health theory and applications that advance systems medicine
- Digital transformation of ecology and life sciences research, its prospects, and challenges for novel ways of thinking about and intervening on COVID-19 and other ecological crises in this decade and beyond.
OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed forum of postgenomic biology and medicine that brings together researchers and scholarship that illuminate the study of large-scale biological, ecological and societal problems.
Participate in this special issue by submitting your article to OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology today. For complete instructions for authors, click here.
We look forward to reading your manuscripts in the near future.